The New Bazaar

Having guided Cardiff through the craft of economic storytelling in the prior episode, Tim Harford returns to explain the lessons of three economic stories from his own podcast, Cautionary Tales.

Links:

-- "The Truth about Hansel and Gretel"

-- "Buried by the Wall Street Crash"

-- "Florence Nightingale and her Geeks Declare War on Death"

Tim Harford is the author of numerous terrific economics books and the host of two great podcasts: “Cautionary Tales”, about what we should learn from big mistakes; and “More or Less”, about statistics. He also writes columns and essays for the Financial Times. 

And what sets Tim apart in all these different mediums is his exceptional storytelling. And when it comes to telling economic stories – stories that are meant to grab your attention, and keep you in suspense, and then ultimately land on a message or a lesson that really stays with you – I’m not sure there’s anyone better. 

And Tim’s latest book, The Data Detective, is no different: there’s a lot of great stories in it. But what I really loved about it is that it’s very much also about the craft of storytelling itself. And that’s what today’s conversation with Tim is also about: What are the ingredients of a captivating story? Why is it that stories are so necessary for fighting back against misinformation? (Why aren’t the facts themselves enough?) And how do you wield the power of storytelling responsibly? 

Links from the episode:

• Cautionary Tales, hosted by Tim Harford, from Pushkin Industries (https://bit.ly/3eopqDX)
• "The Problem with Facts", by Tim Harford (https://bit.ly/3Fpvjg2)
• The Data Detective, by Tim Harford (https://bit.ly/3EoekcG)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Vicki Bogan is an economist who specializes in financial economics, household finance, and behavioral finance – in other words, a specialist in how people make investment decisions. Whether to invest in the stock market or the bond market; how much; and other kinds of investing too, like whether to pursue a graduate degree.

And the things she has found that influence our investment decisions are often things we don’t really consider. Like the kinds of households we live in, our health, or even things like the gender of our children. And as you’ll hear in the chat with Cardiff, she is interested in figuring out what is really going on. Not how people should make choices, but how they actually do make choices – and why those choices matter.

Links from the episode:

• Vicki Bogan’s web site 
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

The labor market is in a weird place -- millions of fewer workers are employed than before the pandemic, yet millions of more jobs are available and wages are climbing fast.

But there has been a lot of experimentation. Workers are quitting in near-record numbers. Working from home is an obvious example of an idea that many more companies are testing. New kinds of automation are taking the place of some jobs. More people are starting their own small businesses. Some companies are trying out a four-day work week. In a tightening labor market, employers have also started trying new ways of recruiting workers. 

But will this experimentation last? And if it does, how will that fundamentally change the labor market -- and how we think about the nature of work itself? 

Links from the episode:

• Julia is on Twitter at @juliaonjobs
• Ziprecruiter articles by Julia Pollak
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

If you look at some of the big and mostly troubling economic trends in the overall US economy from the last three or four decades, the business of the sport of Mixed Martial Arts captures a stunning number of them: rising income and wealth inequality; increased firm concentration in some economic sectors, sometimes because they bought out their competition; the declining share of the money that companies make that goes to workers; the decline of unions; the gig economy; the lack of bargaining power that workers have when they negotiate wages with their companies. 

John S Nash, a journalist for Bloody Elbow, joins Cardiff to discuss the economic history of MMA and the sport’s dominant company, the UFC -- and to reveal the many ways that the sport captures the extreme version of so many broader economic trends within the US economy. 

And after the credits, they also give their predictions for UFC 269. 

Links from the episode:

• John S Nash is on Twitter at @heynottheface
• Bloody Elbow (https://tinyurl.com/3chc4ucy)
• John on Crooklyn’s Corner (https://tinyurl.com/yckwmz83)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Economists don’t just try to understand the economy. They also influence it. Because as they share their analysis and understanding of it, people and institutions and companies and politicians start to act differently -- precisely in response to that understanding of how the economy works. Which means that the economy itself then changes, and economists have to catch up and try to understand it again. 

That is one of the themes in a new book called Cogs and Monsters, by the economist Diane Coyle, Cardiff’s guest in this episode. The book is also about how the digitization of the economy in particular presents such thorny new challenges for understanding it. Diane never goes for easy criticisms or easy solutions. She burrows deep. And she makes the point that the economy, like society at large, is always in flux. And so the job of the economist can never be finished. 

Links from the episode:

• Cogs and Monsters, by Diane Coyle (https://tinyurl.com/2swtr22n)
• The Enlightened Economist, Diane Coyle’s blog (https://tinyurl.com/wxjruvsd)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

At least rhetorically, the politically conservative approach to economics was once associated with lower taxes, deregulation of the economy, cutting government spending, free trade and cutting the budget deficit (In reality, what conservatives have actually done when they have been in power has been different, but that was the governing philosophy). But all that seems to have changed in the last roughly half decade. There’s been a lingering and visible tension between the old-school free-market-y conservatism, and a different “populist” approach that’s largely, though not exclusively, associated with Donald Trump. And that tension has made it hard to answer the question: “What is conservative economics now?” If, or when, Republicans are in power again, what policies will they pursue? What will conservative pundits and policymakers and economists advise them to do? 

Cardiff has no idea anymore. So he invited Karl Smith, an economist and columnist at Bloomberg, to the show. Together they discuss how conservative economics has shifted on the issues of trade, immigration, the deficit, entitlement spending, and more. 

Links from the episode:

• Karl is on Twitter at @karlbykarlsmith
• Karl Smith’s articles at Bloomberg (https://tinyurl.com/cxd9vpym)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

For this special collaborative episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff has teamed up with his friend and former colleague Matt Klein, who writes The Overshoot newsletter. Matt and Cardiff spend the episode carefully -- and without jargon -- walking listeners through the data on the US economy. Is the economy back to its pre-pandemic strength? What about jobs? How much are people getting paid? What’s the deal with inflation? Is there anything surprising about the economy that more people should be aware of? They answer all these questions and more. 

Matt is Cardiff’s favorite economic data sleuth because of his rare ability to make sense of an enormous variety of economic indicators, arriving at nuanced but intelligible conclusions. So if you’ve wanted one podcast episode that tells you, in plain language, just where the economy is right now, this is it. And as a bonus, Matt has simultaneously written a special post at The Overshoot, which you can find via the link below, adding details and analysis to their chat. Go check it out! 

Links from the episode:

• Matt is on Twitter at @M_C_Klein
• The Overshoot, by Matt Klein (https://tinyurl.com/7m4ze4ef)
• Trade Wars are Class Wars, by Matt Klein and Michael Pettis (https://tinyurl.com/cf7bj84j)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Anne Case and Angus Deaton are the authors of the book Deaths of Despair -- which is also a phrase that refers to the combination of deaths resulting from three causes: suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol. 

An epidemic of these deaths of despair started roughly a couple of decades ago. What Anne and Angus have found is that the increase in these deaths was entirely concentrated in people without college degrees. And they have looked at how other gaps between college and non-college folks have also become bigger and bigger in the last fifty years. 

They’ve also looked at how that societal division also interacts in important ways with other societal divisions, like racial and ethnic inequality, and geographic inequality. And crucially, how those interactions between these different trends can change over time. Or as Anne says in the chat with Cardiff, the battlefield for understanding these trends is dynamic. 

Anne and Angus also discuss with Cardiff the findings of their new study, which shows how Covid has affected mortality rates for people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and also for people without college degrees versus people with college degrees (which they further break down by race and ethnicity, gender, and age).

Links from the episode:

• Case and Deaton's latest paper, Mortality Rates by College Degree Before and During COVID-19 (https://tinyurl.com/datsw4ky)
• Deaths of Despair book (https://tinyurl.com/7rwahs87)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Nicholas Wapshott speaks with Cardiff about his new book, Samuelson Friedman, about the fierce economic debates between economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman -- debates that have evolved through the decades, yet are still relevant to this very day.

Links from the episode:

• Samuelson Friedman book page (https://tinyurl.com/wykc796w)
• Keynes Hayek book page (https://tinyurl.com/5ade64dz)
• Interview about Keynes Hayek (https://tinyurl.com/4dzk45xd)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]